Dan Snow: I hate to say this, but apps do beat books

Historian Dan Snow says that apps offer possibilities that simply aren't
available in books or television

Dan Snow has spent six months developing an app about the Second World War

By Dan Snow

7:15AM BST 19 Apr 2012

I have recently undergone a Damascene conversion. I have fallen utterly head over heals for apps. It began as a bit of fun. I didn’t even own an iPad, or any device I could view apps on.

Brought up on books, living in a flat surrounded by books, an author of a couple of them, the son of one author and the nephew of another, I never listened to those who questioned whether the 500-year-old hegemony of words printed on paper was coming to an end.

Now I have all the zealotry of a convert.

I have spent the past six months working with a team to develop an app about the Second World War, Timeline World War 2. The process has given me a profound understanding and respect for exactly what is possible. Apps on a tablet device quite simply give you all the combined benefits of books, television, the web and radio, with few of the disadvantages.

An app allows the author to use the most appropriate medium: chunks of well-written text when prose is called for to explain a key turning point; still photographs to illustrate every aspect of the war; moving film archive to bring an unparalleled immediacy, showing things like Stuka dive-bombers shrieking out of the sky; audio files of speeches; filmed eye-witness testimonies of participants; and graphic maps that show the ebb and flow of war in a dynamic way rather than as a series of static slices of time.

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So many of my frustrations when writing or making television and radio programmes relate to the straitjacket imposed by the medium. Much of the emotional intensity of eye-witness testimony is lost when it is transcribed and quoted on the page of a book, and television is so limiting in the number of words one is able to broadcast in even an hour-long documentary.

Radio cannot possibly capture the visual impact of an event such as Pearl Harbor, or the haggard eyes of a German soldier among the ruins of Stalingrad.

None of these mediums allows a user to move a timeline of a map of the Second World War and watch as front lines race across the Russian steppe or edge agonisingly slowly up the Italian peninsula. As a programme maker and an author, I have also been keenly aware that I am a bully.

Thanks to the linear nature of the television and radio script or the written narrative of a book, the audience has no choice but to follow your path. There is a place for this, of course. The well-written history that draws the reader in, adds detail without overburdening and leaves you enlightened is a beautiful thing, and an accomplishment that I aspire to.

But for a user to search, jump around, filter and explore an app is like putting them in the driving seat. If they are interested in a person, a battle, a theme or a country, they can pursue that without leafing through pages and pages of accounts of Guadalcanal or the North African campaign.

I will always love books – and certain types of book, like novels, with a precise and unswerving narrative, will always have a place – but for an encyclopaedic account of a great historical event like the Second World War, apps are, quite simply, better.